Simon Van Zylenwood

An explicit sort of martyrdom terms compared to a number of biblical figures.

He was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone.

He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more sort of malign forces that were creeping up on the young right.

And without Charlie Kirk there...

they started to become much more prominent.

And so you had students who were both radicalized against the left by his death.

They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance, but they also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who was actually keeping these darker forces at bay in a way that has only become more evident after his death.

There's two poles in the piece, and they're represented by two big state schools that I spend time at, the University of Mississippi and Clemson University in South Carolina.

And the University of Mississippi, basically the main character in my piece, is the president of the TPUSA chapter at Ole Miss.

She's 20 years old.

She's from Westchester County, New York.

She represents a kind of micro trend in the piece, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big universities.

quote unquote, all American schools in the South.

And I met a lot of these kids, actually, at Clemson, at Ole Miss, at other places.

She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom, the post-TPSA boom, where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status grows.

As I'm spending time with her on campus, I mean, she's a queen bee.

Everybody knows who she is.

Everybody wants to come to her table outside the student union, outside the big campus grove, a famous gathering spot in Oxford, Mississippi, on campus.

There was a posthumous tour that Charlie Kirk was supposed to be on.

The tour that he was killed on, they continued.